When I first began my journey into the world of observability, I was fortunate to have a mentor and manager who fundamentally shaped the way I think about IT operations. His name was David Johnson , and he taught me something that seems almost counter-cultural even today: the true power of observability is only realized when it is deeply integrated with IT Service Management (ITSM).
He used to say, “Alerts are only noise until they’re given a purpose. ITSM gives that purpose structure, history, and accountability.” I’m sure I’m paraphrasing—and probably not even saying it right—because my memory isn’t what it used to be, but the sentiment has stuck with me.
And here’s the honest part: I fought him every step of the way.
Not because I didn’t respect him or believe he knew what he was doing, but because it just didn’t click for me at the time. So many of the things David tried to teach me felt like extra work, or overkill, or just counter to the way everyone else around me was doing things. But as I’ve traveled further down this path, it all started to make sense. It has clicked—hard.
Looking back now, I really appreciate him being so patient with me, even when I pushed back. The lessons he shared, and the way he modeled operational discipline and transparency, have proven to be immensely valuable throughout my career.
ITSM as the Historical Record
David believed—and rightly so—that ITSM systems like ServiceNow should act as the historical record of the organization. Not just a place to resolve incidents or log change requests, but a central repository of the life of the environment. Every alert, whether it's a critical outage or a minor threshold breach, has a story to tell. And when those stories are consistently documented, they become patterns. And when patterns emerge, transformation becomes possible.
This mindset allowed us to move from reactive firefighting to proactive optimization.
Performance Analytics + Monitoring + Observability = Operational Clarity
One of the most powerful combinations we used was integrating performance monitoring with ServiceNow’s Performance Analytics. With every meaningful metric tied to a ticket—whether it was actionable or not—we built dashboards that told us the truth. And this wasn’t just technical truth. It was business-impact truth.
As a retail company, preparing for the holiday season was make-or-break. And yet, without this integration, we would’ve been flying blind. Instead, each year, we generated a series of reports in advance of peak season and distributed them to our respective teams.
These weren’t just vanity metrics or superficial charts. They highlighted areas where CPU usage had been trending upward, where API latency had spiked during promotions, where disk space was repeatedly nearing thresholds. Armed with this information, teams could harden their environments before the first Black Friday deal dropped. And it worked.
We had fewer unplanned outages, faster root cause analysis, and better collaboration between infrastructure and application teams. The secret wasn’t some fancy new tool. The secret was transparency.
Why Are We Still Scared of Tickets?
Fast forward to today, and I still see organizations that push alerts into Slack, Teams, email… and nowhere else. There's a cultural reluctance to log a ticket because, somehow, it's seen as a sign of failure. But this mindset is dangerous.
Avoiding tickets doesn’t reduce problems—it just hides them.
Every alert that goes untracked is a missed opportunity to learn. Every anomaly that doesn’t make it into your ITSM platform is a piece of insight lost. Every incident that doesn’t get tied to a trend becomes a one-off instead of part of a larger narrative. When organizations say they want to be data-driven, this is where it starts: with total visibility, not selective silence.
Real Change Requires Real Data
The marriage of monitoring, observability, and ITSM is about more than just automation or integrations. It’s about commitment. It’s about organizations being brave enough to face the truth of their environments—even when it’s messy. Because only then can real change happen.
By embracing this level of transparency, companies can unlock new levels of maturity. They can predict and prevent issues instead of reacting. They can optimize instead of constantly patching. And most importantly, they can build a culture where problems aren’t hidden—they're surfaced, studied, and solved.
Thank You, David
So here’s to David Johnson —my mentor, my guide, and the person who helped me see monitoring & observability not as a collection of dashboards, but as the heartbeat of an organization. Thank you for being patient with me, for investing in me even when I was skeptical, and for showing me the value in logging everything.
You taught me that tickets aren’t the enemy—they’re a window into truth. You showed me that ITSM, monitoring, and observability aren’t separate functions, but powerful allies. And now, years later, I see just how right you were.
If you’re reading this and still relying on Slack alerts or email digests to keep tabs on your environment, I encourage you to rethink it. Let your ITSM platform be your source of truth. Let tickets tell the story. And most importantly, don’t fear the ticket.
Embrace it.
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